A Quote by Josh Widdicombe
I grew up watching 'The Office' and 'Father Ted' and all the British things at that time - 'The Royle Family' - and the American ones like 'Friends,' 'Frasier' and 'The Simpsons.'
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We have a lot of American TV in Australia. I grew up watching 'Seinfeld,' 'The Simpsons' and those prime time TV shows over the years that feature grown-ups and high school kids. We had a saturation of American voices.
For most of the millions of people who watch TED videos at the office, it's a middlebrow diversion and a source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it's changing the world, like if 'This American Life' suddenly mistook itself for Doctors Without Borders.
When I was growing up, we used to be like the Royle family, sitting around watching lots of TV and commenting on it. It was our focal point.
I have no idea what a British sensibility or a British sense of humor is. I have no concept of what that is. I have no concept of what American sensibility is. I was born in Great Britain, but I was only there for six months, and we moved to Belgium, where I grew up. I love Britain, I lived there for nine years doing shows and things, but I don't know what a British sensibility is. I'd like to have someone tell me what an American sensibility is.
In Australia, I grew up watching 'The Mickey Mouse Club,' my son grew up watching 'Sesame Street,' my grandson's growing up watching 'Dora The Explorer.' So we are sort of saturated with American culture from the day we're born, and to those of those who do have an ear for it, it's second nature.
Like everyone is either, "I grew up with it," or "I loved it," or loved them now. And when you watch The Muppet Movie now, it is so current. It's like The Simpsons before The Simpsons. It's not as cynical as The Simpsons would be but it's self-aware and there are a billion jokes, it breaks the fourth wall every five minutes, it's astounding, it's awesome. It's very exciting to be a part of that.
I'm into comedy, stuff like 'The Office,' 'The Royle Family,' 'Only Fools And Horses,' 'Bilko,' that sort of stuff.
I grew up in a family that my father was a very, very, a person with so many ideas, so many new visions and dreams. For me to grow up in that family, that also helped me to have a vision to create and open boundaries and things. So I think it's like, it just comes from the family.
In my town, I had only one adult American male role model: my father. I grew up taking it for granted that missionaries were what American boys grew up to be.
And I grew up watching all the British ones so when you hear that from an early age, it makes it much easier than you guys who don't grow up with Australian television or British television.
I grew up in the '50s, a tough time for African Americans. I had friends whose fathers would openly say, 'Just bite your tongu;, don't cause any problems.' My father was not like that. Even in the toughest times racially, if somebody disrespected his family, they were in trouble.
I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.
I grew up, obviously, watching tons of animation; Saturday morning cartoons or anything that we could get our hands on. And then when 'The Simpsons' premiered, that just kind of changed the landscape of everything. We hadn't had prime time animations since 'The Flintstones.'
We grew up with my family being very passionate about two sports, American football and British football.
I grew up watching a lot of American television and so the American sound has been in my psyche somehow for a long time and is quite familiar and so that does make it easier.
I know for a fact, obviously, because my kids grew up watching the show, that there are some things they are introduced to from 'The Simpsons', and then later in life they see the thing we're parodying. My kids had not seen 'Casablanca,' and we'd done parodies of 'Casablanca.'
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